Personalities

Brandon Jew

Brandon's Links:

Chef

For Brandon Jew, working with local farms to obtain the freshest and best ingredients possible is the most natural thing in the world. A San Francisco native, he has early memories of accompanying his Chinese grandmother to Chinatown on her daily trips to buy fresh produce and ingredients for family meals. Today, as Chef at Bar Agricole, he is in regular communication with the farmers who grow for the restaurant. Most of the time, produce updates are given by email, but Jew also calls his growers regularly and personally visits the farms that supply Bar Agricole. He also enjoys having his growers dine at the restaurant when their delivery schedules permit it.

Jew did not start out intending to be a chef. He worked in several restaurants while getting a degree in Biology at UC Irvine, but then heeded an inner summons to travel to Europe and learn more about food. He spent about ten months staging throughout Northern Italy, though most of his time was spent at Ristorante La Pernice e La Gallina, in Bologna. In Italy, he observed the pride that came from following culinary traditions and experienced the distinct regionality of Italian food.

Upon returning to California, he worked at some of San Francisco's finest restaurants, where his culinary signature was honed and refined. He cooked under Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café for a year and a half before moving on to a two year stint at Quince where he perfected his butchering skills under the tutelage of chef Michael Tusk. Next, he packed his bags once again to explore his Chinese culinary heritage in Shanghai where he cooked both Chinese and California dishes at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art. After eight months in China, Jew returned to the Bay Area, where he worked at Pizzetta 211, Bar Jules, Camino, and Adesso before settling into his role as chef at Bar Agricole.

Overall, Jew says that his style at Bar Agricole is to have an ingredient driven menu that is exemplary of San Francisco. All of the farms he now works with are certified Biodynamic or organic. He says that as farms change in the Bay Area, his cooking will also change as he makes use of what they have grown. For example, he says that there is an increasingly wider range of locally grown Asian vegetables ---such as tatsoi and shiso.

Brandon Jew has won the hearts of food critics. Patricia Unterman, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, called Jew's dishes "little masterpieces." Specifically, she said the tomato salad is one of the best in San Francisco, and said the salt-baked sea bass is "one of the finest little fish dishes in town." Michael Bauer, in his restaurant review in the San Francisco Chronicle, noted that "Jew is able to coax beautiful flavors out of his ingredients," and awarded Bar Agricole a coveted three stars.